


perilous seas in faery lands forlorn

by orphan_account



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Aged Up, F/M, Scottish Yuuri | Gloria, Trauma, as a treat, bede can have a little psychic ability, canon compliance is a weakness, powerful sadboy energy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:07:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21552772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: He will never let them take what he does not freely give.A study on self-determination, growing up strange, and maybe stopping an apocalypse with the girl he absolutely has no feelings for.
Relationships: Beet | Bede/Yuuri | Gloria
Comments: 79
Kudos: 476





	1. Chapter 1

Once upon a time, there was a lost little changeling boy, a long-limbed wildling made for wilder places, who was given many fine things by a Master who chose him before all others. _There will be more,_ it was said in the fitting room in front of a dizzy kaleidoscope of mirrors, as a tailor pulled a measuring tape too tightly around an underfed waist. The boy held his breath and did not say a word. _You’ll have anything you want if you turn out how I think you might_. 

The fabric he selects is a fuchsia too bright to be ignored, and his Master smiles in a way that is almost even fond.

The boy does not know how far the expectations extend -- does not know how long he’ll be in service to this Master -- but he will contort himself into whatever shape he needs to be to fit them. He will wear the correct clothing; he will eat the correct food; he will be seen with the correct people, choose the correct teammates, sleep in the correct places. He will tame himself for this. Being chosen for greatness is a responsibility as much as it is a gift.

 _I’m counting on you to do this right,_ his Master says when the coat is finished nearly a week later, handing him the elegant paper box personally as though bestowing a knighthood. He has never owned new clothing until now, or received a gift. The paired watch, a glittering strap of gold polished to a glow that almost hurts to look at, is worth more than has ever been spent to keep him alive. 

(He swallows a little bramble of bitterness that wanders too close to his mouth. Emotions like these are treasonous, ruinous things that must be locked away with the rest of his weakness.) 

_You’re representing me out there. Wear it proudly._

Oh, but he does.

* * *

Bede’s parents are taken by the fairies when he is five.

It is known that the fae do this; his mother had books that she read him. Courts of morgrem spirit away the unguarded, ply them with mulled wine and alcremie milk sweets that they drink and eat until their bodies forget what home used to be. It happens too quickly for goodbyes and be-goods and love-you-lots. He understands, even if it hurts.

He hopes they’re happy, wherever they are.

* * *

Once upon a time, there was a farmer’s girl, peasant stock, sturdy like a mudbray and just as brown. Seventeen is old enough to be a worker, but she was working long before that -- her hands have calluses that know the guts of a tractor, the tack of a mudsdale, the handle of an axe. She has strong arms made for cutting wood and hauling feedsacks. Laborer’s scars are worn like badges of honor and she speaks with an unapologetically rural brogue. The Motostoke Stadium lobby tries to swallow her, intimidate her, but she is a girl who is built to endure the killing winters of the southern highlands and she will not be made small in this space.

As he passes, she gives him a smile like a hearthfire. The changeling boy does not know why he stopped to look. 

She doesn’t mean a thing to him. None of them do.

* * *

This is how the world ends: Something terrible and older than mercy snaps steel as easy as a wishbone, and the first wolves howl until there is nothing but the ringing in his ears. Every sound is a thousand miles underwater. He dangles liked the hanged man. Blood trickles up his lobes, up his temples, up into his hair where it dries sticky and matted. There is a storm outside so black and total it unreals the sun until no one in the world remembers what daylight is.

He is the only one left in the car. His parents left the windows open when they flew away into the woods, alight on the wings of fairies, and he waits there patiently for them to return. The rain numbs him. He spends years upside-down -- he is thirsty, but has nothing to drink but the blood in his mouth where his teeth have cracked.

(They never come back.)

He had hoped, when he was younger, that this dream would stop someday -- but he is still waiting for that, too.

* * *

Once upon a time, the changeling boy lived in a group home.

It was not as bad as the stories. They were clothed and fed to some kind of standard, if not loved. They had dollar shop crayons and shoes from charity drives, if the other children didn’t try to trick them, bully them, or steal them away. They had each other, for what little it was worth when their worlds shifted once or twice a week; Bede had friends, until they were snapped up by counterfeit parents and taken away with unrealized promises to call, to write, to visit. He didn’t much see the point in friends after that.

There are supposed to be meetings, sometimes, when the caretakers can hold him down long enough to get a brush through his tangle of platinum curls. A pretty blond boy with the face of a cherub, they tell him, should get adopted quickly if he minds his manners.

He does not want to be adopted.

(The prospectives do not like him much anyway once they actually meet him. His stillness is offputting, unnatural; the defiance in his too-violet eyes moreso. He is asked to show them a smile and he bares his teeth like a Liepard grins. _You’re not my parents,_ he recites in his head, and maybe he is a psychic because that is the conclusion they always reach as well.)

Over the fence they are not supposed to climb, beyond the treeline they are not supposed to cross _,_ he finds some comfort in a sack of stolen books and the crooked branches of a willow tree. He is not scared of the fairies in the woods, and they are not scared of him. Wild recognizes wild.

* * *

Once upon a time, a hatenna waddled up while the changeling boy dozed halfway through a novel much too big for him, and stretched herself across the book in his lap like a cat might settle for a nap. They remain best friends until they die.

* * *

Bede doesn’t understand how he loses to the girl.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he says aloud to no one. It’s been hours. He should sleep, like his hatenna snoring gently in his lap, but the wishing stones in his bag make his teeth itch and he can’t stop replaying the match in his head, details fuzzier every time. “She’s nobody.” He gestures rudely at the air. “The Champion endorsed her for being friends with his _brother._ That’s not skill, that’s nepotism.”

All of his training and fighting and scrapping on the rungs of the no-name Wyndon ladders crumble at the feet of a lizard, a donkey, and a pile of rocks. Again, he replays the battle, beat by beat, move by move. Thinks about his plays. Thinks he missed his moment, as the Onix held its strike, to make the tag-out. Thinks about his team’s skillsets, if he ought to diversify. Thinks about this _rube,_ her grandmotherly sweater, how she had rolled her weight like a prizefighter and pressed him into a corner with an inevitable, immovable confidence. 

(Thinks about the dapple of freckles on her cheeks, and the warming smile, and the way her dumb, ugly horse-laugh followed him down the tunnel as though he’d told her the funniest joke in the world when he lost his temper and called her something unpleasant.)

Bede doesn’t cultivate strong emotions -- Hatenna does not like it, and he loves his friend more than he loves his feelings. But he thinks he hates this girl.

He hates her more than anything.

* * *

Her trainer card, he notes, says _Gloria,_ before he tears it in half and throws it in the trash.

* * *

Bede’s parents are taken by fairies when he is five.

“Love,” the group home’s counselor says to him, adjusting her glasses. He has seen this woman every week for the last five years. He has known her for as long as he knew his own mother. “I know it’s difficult, but we’ve gone over this. We’re not going to be able to make any progress if you keep regressing into these old patterns.”

“I don’t care,” he says.

They will try to wear him down, but Bede is not a quitter. His conviction does not waver. He will never let them take what he does not freely give.

* * *

Once upon a time in a fisherman’s town, the farmer’s girl offers the changeling boy half of her bridie pie, and his pride is much slower to react than the feral thing crouched in his hindbrain that remembers the group home too keenly. He snatches the offering and stands to eat it with a car’s distance between the two of them. She sits on a bench, eyes out to sea.

She attempts: “Hulbury’s nice.” 

He does not respond.

A few beats later: “I’ve never seen the ocean afore. Have you?”

He does not respond.

She does not quit. A mouth around mince and onion and bits of pie crust, she says: “M’name’s Gloria.”

“Stop talking with your mouth full,” he spits. “Highlands barbarian.”

“Highlands barbarian, aye, tha’s me.” She swallows and grins and looks all the vision as she did in the cave, brown eyes lit with something between amusement and predation. _Victory._ “Figured I could get you tae talk. What’s your story, then? Bede, aye?”

(They weren’t even fighting and she still came at him, still got by him, still _won._ )

Last bite finished, he forgets himself and wipes his mouth on his coat sleeve, a motion unbefitting his new station. The crumpled napkin gets thrown into the trash with more force than necessary. “I don’t owe you anything.”

“S’pose you don’t.” She’s still grinning. He can see it in her eyes -- she is watching him, waiting to see what he does. Cataloging movement. Strategizing. _Learning him._ “I’d offer you luck tomorrow, but I'm thinkin' Nessa needs it more than you do. She’s go' her work cut out for her.”

He does not respond, and that ugly horse-laugh of hers follows him all the way down the street, into the hotel, long after the echo stops.

* * *

He dines later that night with the chairman, orders food more delicate and more expensive than he’s had in his life, and resents that none of it tastes as good as the bridie.

* * *

This is how the world ends: Something terrible and older than mercy snaps steel as easy as a wishbone, and the first wolves howl until there is nothing but the ringing in his ears. Every sound is a thousand miles underwater. He dangles liked the hanged man. Blood trickles up his lobes, up his temples, up into his hair where it dries sticky and matted. There is a storm above so black and total it unreals the sun until he can’t remember how to stay warm.

He is the only one left in the parking lot, he thinks, swinging by his ankle and a strap of seatbelt from a lamp post. He is spotlit in sodium vapor orange and his mouth buzzes-hums-itches-hurts with an alien frequency that vibrates his bones and shivers into the base of his skull. Stones tumble from his pockets and the storm gets worse as each one crumbles into rust on the pavement. _Close your eyes and make a wish_. The rain freezes him from the outside in and there is nothing he can do to stop it.

There is a girl looking up at him. Watching. Strategizing. _You’re in a sorry state, aren’t you? Wolves are comin’, you know._

 _Leave me alone,_ he says to to her. _I’m better than you. I was chosen. You’ll never pull me down._

She grins and reaches up to him. The points of contact on his changeling skin brand, too-hot -- like her fingers are made of iron.

_We’ll see about that._

He wakes up scowling as hard as his heart runs quick. The silk sheets of his patron-paid suite do nothing to soothe the burning of his hand.

* * *

Once upon a time, they almost get him.

The changeling boy is thirteen when they tell him, _there’s nothing to be done about it, the paperwork’s through._ They tell him, _unnatural you aren’t happy about it._

They tell him that they’re very nice people, and will not listen when he says no. He does not want to go with them. He will not get in that car. The fairfolk can send as many fetches as they want; they will not replace his parents in his head or his heart.

He puts all the things he owns in a bag: Hatenna in a pokeball stolen from a caretaker, a change of clothes, a pair of socks, a bag of crisps, a dog-eared copy of _The Art of Battle_ by some dusty Kantonian warlord. They are too busy making arrangements for the exchange when he makes a break for the fence, hauls his weedy frame over, and is gone, gone, gone.

* * *

There are romantic notions that he’ll live with his fairies in the woods, eating plums and mushrooms as wild as him, befriending an alcremie who will lavish him with sweets. In reality, the woods end a mile from the property, opening out into a sad, struggling strip mall. For three weeks he washes dishes in the back of a chip shop like a galley servant; the owners feed him the day’s leftovers in return and let him shower in their apartment above the store. He always scrubs for what feels like days, trying to get the smell of the fryer out of his skin.

It is not a fairy tale, but it is his decision, and his alone. He will not be taken. That’s enough.

* * *

Highlander stories say that time is wrong in the Elphane. Days happen in seconds, or years; sometimes it is night for as long as it takes for a seventh son to bear a seventh son; sometimes the contracts between the sun and the moon are forgotten and must be renegotiated. Sometimes there is no time. Sometimes, it repeats--skipped stones, or records.

He keeps losing. He meets Gloria again in another mine, or maybe the same one, colored light and out-of-body, and he loses identically. It feels like both deja vu and future-sight. She laughs without malice as he spits an insult, retreats, eyes stinging with his back turned, tamping down his weakness. Resolves to never lose again. Runs the match back through his mind over and over into the early morning hours, spends the next day haggard and undone. _Repeat._

He cannot think of another explanation. He is trapped here, with himself, with her, and it won’t stop happening no matter how much he wills it. 

She will be the ruin of him. He knows it.

* * *

Bede’s parents are taken by fairies when he is five.

“Fulla shit, mate.” An older boy from one of the farming backwaters sits sprawled on the shared couch, in the shared apartment, the both of them marinating in the humid Wyndon summer. They’re both new additions to the too-cramped house, but this one’s here more for laughs than need, not like Bede. His parents still like him, he says. He just got bored, wanted to try the city. “They died, or they left. Get over it.”

(The whole arrangement’s not much different from the group home, in the end -- a Neverland of too many rowdy, lost, wrongways kids without their keepers. He’s had nine years to learn the drill. You carve some kind of place for yourself, or you get run over, and he has _never_ been run over.) 

Bede does not get mad about it like he used to. He does not suck in a deep breath and count himself to stillness. He is already still. “I don’t have to prove anything to you,” he says with a calculated edge of smugness. He has been watching -- learning. Strategizing. He finds a fulcrum and presses.

(It’s a stupid fight, but fourteen years old is its own brand of stupid. His place here will be carved.)

It plays out like Bede sees it in his head: The older boy puffs out his chest, apelike, some hairy-knuckled rise to his defiance. Reactionary. He reaches for his pokeball, which Bede knows contains his farm-family’s tired-out dubwool, years out from its fighting prime. The boy says, “I’m tired of you weirdin’ up the place, makin’ the girls nervous. Let’s settle.”

Bede placidly flashes teeth in what could only politely be called a smile, which doesn't reach his too-violet eyes. “Loser leaves?”

“Loser leaves,” the boy agrees.

* * *

The boy packs his things and slams the door on his way out hard enough to crack the drywall. Bede’s pocket is heavy with spending money, now; his team is beautiful and the pink sun flirts with the horizon over the river and his belly is full of food truck kebab bought with his winnings. He feels, for an aching moment, that he belongs at least a little to this world.

He can fight for a spot. All he needs is a chance.

* * *

Once upon a time there was a changeling boy who would do anything for his Master. The summons were irresistible, though he would never try -- he could be called from anywhere, for anything, and he would cross the distance. Nothing was too much of an inconvenience. He did as he was told, and he did it gladly. 

The wishing stones array on his Master’s desk like some primordial dragon’s hoard, and the dragon counts them by twos, smiling with each pair. His changeling woman, his west wind witch, stands to the side, reading each stone for flaws. _Excellent. Very good work. My faith in you was well-placed._ He knows; sweats into his palms anyway. _However._

He freezes.

_We are moving the timeline forward._

He does not make excuses, does not use the word “impossible,” but explains -- he cannot go faster. His limits are real.

 _Oh, nonsense._ His Master’s smile is a flashbomb; he cannot look directly at it. _You’re a clever boy. You’ll find a way._

He is, so he will.

* * *

The respect and esteem will be worth it, in the end. The billion dollar man in the ten thousand dollar chair answers to no one.

* * *

Once upon a time, there was a farmer’s girl who waited at a crossroad outside of Hammerlocke for what must have been hours just to catch the changeling boy as he passed by, onward to the next challenge, and the next, and the next. She does not wear the hearthfire smile for him this time, or chase him with her laugh. Her eyes are shadowed; the calculations colder.

“Beat Hop all you like,” she says with an almost ancient, matronly grimness, “but don’t you go off bein’ cruel. I’ll no' have it. That's it.”

(He has found her pressure point--a mortal fulcrum. He’s been waiting for this; does not understand why his ribcage feels hollow, why he is looking for something in her face that is no longer there.)

He doesn’t have an explanation for her; doesn’t know what an apology would even taste like in his mouth. All he knows how to do is push. “I don’t see why you’re defending him. He treats you like you only exist to be his stepping stone.”

“Oh? You worried about my feelin’s now?”

He scoffs. “I couldn’t care less about your feelings.”

And then she grins, and the chill passes, and he takes a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “Good. Coulda troubled a lass, gettin’ off-script like that. Come on then, said my piece, no use standin’ here like a bunch ae tubes. I got supper on the fire. Let’s get some food in you.”

* * *

He hates the way her body language opens up like fortress gates, how her mismatched dimples crinkle with her broad, shameless grin. He hates the lumps in her sweater and her uneven, homemade haircut. He hates that every move around her is a misstep; hates that he can’t land a blow; hates that she takes his momentum and breaks it on the rocks of her and there is nothing he can do about it because the realization always comes too late.

He hates that he lets her take his hand and lead him over difficult ground back to her camp, fingers burning through his gloves like a fever. Hates her laugh that gets stuck in him. Hates his traitor stomach and all his turncoat bones.

Hates feeling handled, domesticated. 

Hates that she _wins._

* * *

This is how the world ends: 

The wolves are silent. Something else speaks from inside his skull at an alien frequency he thinks might shatter the bone trying to punch out of him. He does not have the will to cry.

_There were casualties._

He dangles like the hanged man, ankles purple and lungs pulling apart, from the rib of a monster older than mercy, a nightmare so large he is a speck on a pockmark on the least limb of it. Blood plugs his nose, trickles from a mouth full of brambles and stones that crumble on his tongue. _I said make a wish_. The storm has unrealed itself, a legacy of negative space. He has never seen a blacker black or redder red.

 _You were such a good boy._ His Master smiles, voice leaden. His west-wind witch, his changeling woman, stands guard like a dressmaker’s doll on her pin-feet. Impossible geometry. Sound burns like kindling but nothing echoes here. _It’s a shame it had to come to this._

The farmer’s girl hangs next to him. He reaches for her hand, and finds it cold.

* * *

He can’t breathe.

“Alright?” Gloria calls from beside the campfire. He can’t stand to look at her; doesn’t want to see the pity, or the concern.

He has to wait for his chest to unlock. The first pulls are wheezes. He struggles with the zipper of his sleeping bag and she’s already coming at him with an afghan. “Come on, up you get. You’re alright, Bede, you’re fine. Let’s get you by the fire. Tell me what’s wrong.” 

He lets her wrap him in the blanket, guide him on sleep-drunk legs. She hands him a mug of tea and he holds it like it’s his own heart outside his body, desperate to burn out the chill. He shivers in silence. She sits close enough to smell her soap.

Minutes pass until words can shudder through the brambles, the phantom taste of rust. “I don’t understand what changed.” 

(He can’t stop himself from saying it. These things are inevitable, self-propelled.)

“I was _used_ to it, and you’ve _ruined it._ What did you _do?_ ”

She gives him a look of utter confusion, and for once does not know what to say.

* * *

He leaves after she drifts to sleep, before the dawn breaks, and he’s had time to reassemble the rags of himself. He is representing the Chairman, and she is not the correct kind of people. It’s unbecoming, and he has work to do. Simple as.

* * *

But she’s ruined him.

* * *

In the brick-baking heat of Stow-on-Side, sticky-haired and sleeves rolled up, she ruins him. She is stopping him because she can, he is sure, because she thinks it’s _funny (_ even if she isn’t laughing, he can _hear it_ ), contrarian and inexplicable. His future is behind this glorified fingerpainting and she wants him to throw it away for the sake of something as sentimental as _history_.

He doesn’t understand her; hates her still. Hates her so much his hattrem bristles and even the borrowed copperajah pauses.

“Oh come oan, Bede. This is no' gonna get you what you want.”

He does not snarl at this girl. He does not raise his voice. “You have _no_ idea what I want.”

“Then tell me. Just stop for a _second_ and we’ll figure this out.”

He already _has_ it figured out. If he could just _show her_ \--

* * *

This is how the world ends:

He is disqualified.

“I suppose I have no one to blame but myself,” Rose says as the paperwork is signed and dated to scrub Bede’s name from every inch of the tournament records. The man looks pensive and very nearly remorseful, in the half-seconds Bede can stand to look him in the face. _Heavy hangs the head_. “I should have had Oleana vet you more thoroughly. It isn’t your fault; you just weren’t prepared to meet my expectations. Not everyone is cut out for this.”

_You are dismissed._

They take the wishing stones and the badges, the security clearance and the expense card. They escort him out of the building with nothing but the clothes on his back and his team on his belt. When he sleeps tonight, wherever that is, he will wake up in the morning to find that no one even remembers he exists.

There is no point to anything, now.

* * *

_Bede was taken by the fairies when he was five._

_He lives in the Elphane, some gossamer, pale-veined, white-gold otherworlder who doesn’t remember another home. He does not know the crush of failure. He does not have to fight like a junkyard dog for his keep, everything but scraps and his own name stripped from him. He never met the girl who ruined his life._

_He belongs there and he and his parents are happy in the faelands forever and ever the end._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah i'm a grown adult writing 7000 words of fairy bullshit about an uncooperative child fight my ass


	2. Chapter 2

~~Once upon a time~~

Gloria doesn’t say much when she comes back from Ballonlea, freshly victorious. He doesn’t invite her to his camp outside the walls, _why would he ever,_ but she follows the smoke from the road anyway and takes a seat, legs crossed, on the other side of the tidy fire. (He does not shout her away like he ought to. He is too tired, his teeth do not fit properly around his words.) She looks like she has a thousand things stoppered up in her throat, but her quiet holds. He hates the softness in her face, how the constellations of her freckles stretch and pull with each failed start, the way she sorts through her words like bits of treasure as she tries to find the right ones that will make him not despise her.

“If you’re here to ruin my life again, good luck.” He gives her a long shrug, and gestures broadly at his campsite. “This is it. You’re wasting your time.”

“No’ here to ruin your life.” This is the most immediate thing he’s heard her say. She’s been fidgeting with the hem of her sweater since she showed up, but that -- that was confident. “‘S cruel, what the Chairman did to you.”

“What he did to me _because_ of you.”

“All I did was beat you, Bede.” She wields the truth like a blackjack, and he flinches; she unpacks her cooking kit, begins setting the pot up over the fire, and he grimaces. “Seemed harsh, considerin’ the bigger find. You did Galar a favor in the end.”

He doesn’t say anything; does not want to share with this girl who churns through what he’s built like an earthmover every time she shows up, as though they were close enough for something like sharing. Just thinks, _Then why won’t he take me back?_

* * *

They sit in silence until the sun grows lean and the food is, after some alchemy of tasting and adjusting, finished. She hands him a camping bowl full of something warm and spiced and he spits, “I don’t need your charity.”

“Dunno how to cook charity. ‘S just stew.” She shovels a few mannerless mouthfuls down; at least her own hunger is genuine, even if he's positive nothing else about her is. 

He scowls but there’s no more charging to the company expense card, and his stomach is meaner than it’s been in months.

(He is on his own.)

“Guess the closest hing I could bring to charity,” she considers after a few minutes of quiet eating, “is the gym leader from Ballonlea. She’s huntin’ for a successor. Could be your ticket to the finals, assumin' you're every inch the stubborn bastard I think you are.”

He pauses mid-bite. “...Excuse me?”

* * *

For the fourth time, he is bundled onto a train with the promise that life will be better in the place he arrives.

It has not worked out that way, not once, not ever, but Ms. Opal is as disinterested in adoption as she is thrilled in his potential, and there is an infuriating mote of hope that he has never been able to cut out of his heart for all his efforts. All he needs is a chance.

And it is a low-risk gambit, in the end: there is nothing she could do to him that has not been done before.

* * *

Highlanders say that time is wrong in the Elphane -- that there are conjunctions of land and water where neither sun nor moon will shine until a third wolf is born. Light doesn’t change under great black canopies of impossible trees and the glowing convolutions of mushrooms. Days have no pull in the fairy circles.

First: the calendar smudges in Ballonlea.

He is pliable under the training regimens -- he will read the books, follow the instructions, run the drills. Hours bleed into days into weeks. He is too exhausted to do anything but sleep like the dead every night; the energy for dreams must be spent on strategy and etiquette, first. There’s not enough time for anything that isn’t a book or a battle. 

He does not think of Gloria at all.

(He watches every match in Ms. Opal’s study and feels otherworldly, as though shunted into a sidestep reality. This Gloria on the pitch is different from the one he remembers fighting in the low and wild places, where he could hear her awful laugh and see her sweat and the day’s dirt and all her intent smoldering like coalfire. He doubts this one even remembers his name, if she knew it in the first place.)

Second: After he has settled--when he no longer expects Ms. Opal’s open hand to turn from a stroke to a strike--Bede flips the clasp on the golden watch that looked so much like Rose’s, the last piece of his almost-life that hadn’t been confiscated or tossed, and pitches it off the bridge, into the brook.

Money must be heavy. It sinks, and is gone.

* * *

He checks over his baggage for the thousandth time, runs tingling hands over his team’s pokeballs, his clothes and his uniform, neatly tucked into a proper suitcase. _His_. The uniform is not fashionable, but it is his own. That is enough.

“I’ve taken care of all the arrangements, dear. I know you’re itching for theatrics and that’s what I adore about you, but there’ll be no need to tear out onto the pitch; you’ll be competing in my place.” Opal smiles conspiratorially and pats his arm. He wonders what Rose got out of her for this, if anything. She is eighty years of iron fists and velvet gloves condensed into tea ceremony and parlor politics -- maybe Rose never stood a chance. “You go do an old woman proud out there.”

Oh, but he will.

* * *

_You have to turn around,_ he says to the driver. He can see her through the back window standing under a guttering street light, through the tar splatter of too-thick rain and the inversion of lightning where the world goes black and nothing exists for the span of a heartbeat. There is a syrupy bloom of hateful red on the horizon -- the gullet of an old voracity, a thing of plated bone and killing angles and low, hungry cunning. She gets smaller and smaller behind him and the car pushes on through the floodwater, black brackish and cold up through his shoes, his toes, his ankles and calves. _She’ll be eaten._ He claws at his seatbelt, at the locked door. He wants to run. _You have to stop._

 _You should’ve already said your goodbyes,_ his father says from the driver’s seat. _Everything’s already in motion. We can’t stop just for you._

(But his parents are gone. They are not coming back, not ever.)

The pedal wedges to the floor, seat empty. The car flanks with a shudder and hits an embankment and flips, rolls over itself, steel snapping like wishbones and he rattles in the seat like a ragdoll, skull ringing at a dead pitch. His teeth break; they taste like stardust, parched earth that melts to copper in his mouth. _Make a wish._ Blood trickles up his lobes, up his temples, up into his hair where it dries sticky and matted.

He dangles like the hanged man, colors bland from concussion and a hollow black weight in his ribcage. The first wolves howl outside but he cannot cut himself free.

This is how the world ends: 

_There is nothing he can do._

* * *

He lies in his hotel bed, and tries to breathe.

* * *

~~Once upon a time~~

There is a knock at his door, too late to be good company, and he should be less surprised than he is to see Gloria standing there half-drowned, hands occupied with plastic bags heavy with takeaway, fidgeting with her own weight in a way that almost seems manic.

(It’s been weeks of television screens, watching that strange, sterile doppelganger drive steady as a bulldozer through the challenge while he falls off the face of the earth, that it seems stranger now to see her back to real. Pity can’t live that long outside the body, but imagining any other reason she’d be here is a struggle, and he hates that. Water makes a run off her eyelashes and down the weak geometry of her cheeks, and he hates that a little, too.) 

He squints through the crack in the door and does not remove the chain.

“Cute leggin's,” she says, face splitting into a bright grin that almost hurts as much to look at as the hallway lights, and hefts a bag up to eye-level. “I go' us a Hoennese.”

He rolls his eyes and makes a point to ignore the things he knows by now are calculated. “It’s late and we have a tournament tomorrow, if you’ve forgotten. How did you even get my room number? No--don’t answer that. Get back to your own room and leave me alone.”

“Go' it fae the front desk, hen was real nice after I gave her dumplings.” Still grinning like it’s the funniest joke. (Like nothing he can do is wrong, even though everything is.) “Look at me, it’s torrential out an’ I’m pure soaked. You’d turn a girl away in her time ae need?” 

“Yes.” He shuts the door.

“ _Bede. I’m no’ goin’ away."_ He wishes she would. Her voice is muffled but still loud enough, he thinks, to wake the floor. “ _Bede, I got a full kilo of noodles out here an’ I swear I’m gonna eat ‘em all right in the hallway an’ boak in front ae your door.”_

She’ll give up eventually. He pads back to the bed, lies down and rubs his face and thinks of strategy -- he’ll have trouble with her tomorrow anyway, her and her steel-type inclinations, does not know why she feels the need to turn it into a head game when he’s already in the corner -- and waits for the quiet to settle again, for the tension to ease.

It’s silent, for a moment. Then he hears the weight of her body against the door as it slowly slides down, the light _thump_ of her head resting on it. “ _Bede, we heavy fucked up. Somethin’ bad’s gonna happen tomorrow an’ I dunno what it is or if anybody’s gonna stop it.”_

( _Everything’s already in motion,_ the echo of an echo. His stomach bottoms out.)

He yanks the chain off the door, pulls it open so fast she almost doesn’t catch herself before she falls through the gap. “What did you _do_?”

She hauls herself up, but she is not smiling near as bright as she was before, and walks by him like she belongs in his suite. He shuts the door. “We maybe mighta just done a _wee bit_ of stormin’ Rose Tower. Towels in the closet, right?”

Bede’s eyebrows knit and he stares holes into her even as she grabs a towel, drops onto the couch and unpacks food on the coffee table as though she’d just told him about a bake sale. “ _Pardon?_ ”

“Was Hop’s idea, no’ mine. Do you like soba? Here, come sit an’ have this one, you’re still half bone. Lookin’ better, though.” She pats the couch. 

He takes a deep, calming breath with his eyes closed, and after a moment, he sits and says, even-voiced, “This might be a lot to ask, but could you please at least _attempt_ to stay on the _important topic_.” Selecting a stir-fry and a pair of chopsticks is more of an afterthought, and he stirs a carton of something pork and bitter melon.

“Right.” She swallows, takes a long moment to collect her words in their proper order. “Leon was late an’ we started pokin’ around. An’ pokin’ around turned into bullyin’ some Macro Cosmos roasters into gettin’ the keycard to the buildin’. An’ _that_ turned into a whole…” She makes a broad gesture. “Thing. We _broke in_ , Bede. They came at us in force, an’ the harder they pushed the harder _we_ pushed ‘cause why would they be pushin’ so hard? We just wanted to see Leon, was only in a meetin’, but Rose’s second came at us swingin’. Had to batter her, was no’ fun. Big fuck-aff Garbodor.”

(They hurt him and he’d been helping; of course they’d try to hurt her before she could make a mess of them. Acid boils in his stomach. It takes a moment to swallow down.) 

He levels an incredulous look at her. “Are you mad? You do realize you just put your entire gym challenge at risk, don’t you? You broke into the chairman’s place of business and fought _his own employees._ How has he not disqualified you?”

“I know!” She throws her hands up. “I _know,_ and I’d be worried, but it’s _fucked,_ Bede, we go up there an’ was like _none of it even happened._ Rose apologized to _us,_ Leon told us no’ to worry about it. Him an’ Hop went out for dinner, but it’s just so mental I needed...time. Breathin’ room.”

“And you decided that I am, for whatever _ridiculous_ reason, your breathing room.”

“Who else is there?” For a moment, he thinks, she looks small -- compressed mass that is lost without a space she knows how to fill -- then she’s aggressively toweling off her hair. “The cops? ‘Oh, aye, I trespassed on Macro Cosmos property an’ assaulted some employees, but is fine ‘cause the richest man in Galar had an argument with the Champion an’ made him late for dinner, which is why you should arrest him, no’ me.’ And Rose owns the League so no point kickin’ up fuss through official channels. Only gym leaders we got are Piers an’ you, ‘bout it. Dunno if the others would be willin’ to risk careers over it.”

“You seem confident I’d risk mine just after I’ve gotten it back,” he says suddenly. He is not angry but the sharpness, the weaponization of crisp syllables, gets her attention. “There’s nothing stopping me from taking your little gunpowder plot to Rose. And why shouldn’t I? I want the championship, and you two are my biggest roadblocks on the way to Leon. I don’t owe you anything.”

“Aye, true enough,” she agrees. He has seen her look before, mid-battle -- a singular focus staring miles through him, picking through patterns and choices not made like panning for gold. “But I got your number, Bede. You act calm an’ posh, but I know a dead stubborn scrapper when I see one. You fight, you push, you don’t get put down an’ you don’t quit. You wanna tell me you went through all this bullshit just to get his boot back on your neck? After he hurt you the way he did? Like fuck. You’re too proud.”

He has been looked at a thousand different ways in his life -- dismissal and disappointment, disgust and disdain. He’s been looked at like a threat, like a joke, like a nuisance, like prey. He survived Oleana’s surgical dissection and Rose’s distracted half-interest. He allowed Opal’s fine-edged inspection, as though she were tapping crystal for structural flaws. He has never been looked at with the raw admiration and bright and brilliant and inexplicable _affection_ that she shows him now, unguarded and unafraid. (It is like staring into the sun. He hates it. His ribcage is a vice; everything under the skin aches.)

“Besides,” she adds, grinning, “it's no’ a win if it’s off the pitch.”

That much is true. 

“I do know Rose has a plan,” he admits to his stir-fry, or his shoes; anywhere but looking at her. “I was never important enough to tell what it is, only that it involved wishing stars. So keep your eyes open and don’t do anything stupid.”

“I can promise exactly one ae those.”

He rolls his eyes. “And don’t think this changes _anything_ between us.”

* * *

But everything has changed. This is what he hates the most.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you think i have a plan for this story you're dead wrong


	3. Chapter 3

Once upon a time there was a changeling boy at the end of the world, a wildling made for wilder places, who promised no theatrics to a woman older than history and then did it anyway.

(It’s not fair. It’s not right. He is seeded into a different bracket and can’t bear the thought that someone else might get the win on her. He’s been thinking about her under the stadium lights since Opal’s study, burning up in white; he was here _first._ The loss is an ache and a relief at once.)

And then the storm rolls in.

The rain is already falling -- unreal splatters, fat gobs viscous as paint, as oil, as blood, cold enough to sting like hailstones from a sky that is the blackest black he has ever seen -- and he tilts onto the pitch a second time, rallying every muscle. His old Master talks on the screen, prideful and placid, _done is done,_ and his guts should boil but he only feels like he’s icing over from the inside out. The farmer’s girl stands there, too-clean-white and stone steady when she should be _moving --_ she has not had the dreams -- and he wants to yell at her -- 

_(run you idiot, you’ll die tonight)_

His hand grips her wrist as the light erupts, as the energy whips them both back like paper things, flirtations of matter. An alien frequency buzzes in his skull, his teeth, his tongue. He hits the turf and tastes blood already; looks to his side where she’s getting to her feet. She clasps his hand and hoists him up like a feedsack -- she is too strong, he thinks, or he is too thin -- grip lingering as she inspects him for damage. 

“Thinkin’,” she says after a moment, breathless between a half-wheezing laugh, “yon big bastard storm might be an issue.”

“Make that deduction yourself, did you?” It’s meant to be more biting, _take this seriously,_ but he’s still out of breath, struggling to suck down air. “Stop standing around waiting for it to kill you.”

The grin she gives him then is unnerving, a bright and madcap thing that reminds him of her Haxorus. Her energy shifts from foot to foot, the wrong kind of adrenaline, coiled up and waiting for a release mechanism and an opening. “Think it could?”

Stupid, impossible girl. He hates the look in her eyes. 

(It makes him feel _invincible_.)

“Hold on, nobody’s getting killed,” Leon says, wiping at a shallow cut above his eye, on the curve of his browbone. Bede nearly starts on hearing Leon’s voice, and then the chaos of a crowd in evacuation comes back into sharper focus. Had he forgotten they were there? “We need to get off the pitch before it blows again.”

They run. As they reach the locker rooms, he realizes he hasn’t let go of her hand.

* * *

Her friend comes running too, the champion’s brother, and he and Gloria check each other for damage similarly, though Bede knows the boy’s only come from the lobby. He swallows the throatful of thorns, the _and where were you, then?_ ; they are talking so quickly it’d be gone before anyone noticed he said it. Gloria’s accent is practically another language at a thousand miles an hour, but Hop has no trouble weaving his own words into hers, finishing each other’s sentences.

Legends and heroes and murals are not the only sentimental history. 

“Come on then,” Gloria says suddenly, head turning back to Bede, thrusting out her hand, palm-up, fingers splayed. He eyes it like treating it as a strange offering could, Gods willing, undo all the times he’s held it already. He can still feel her calluses. “We’re headed to the Weald.”

Hop crosses his arms, unconvinced. “Him? Really?”

“Aye, you go’ a problem? Said yourself you didnae--”

“I _don’t_ care, I just think--Listen, Glory, the legend said _two--_ ”

“Right, right, this is ‘bout the _legend_ now--”

“You’re both wasting time,” Bede says sharply. He is acutely aware now how soft his voice is in comparison to these two, how they’re both always straining at the limits of human hearing; he’s surprised they can even hear him to respond, but does not show it. “I’m going with Leon to Hammerlocke.”

News to Leon, who arches an eyebrow and winces as the movement pulls at the fresh cut. “Absolutely not. You’re on evacuation with the rest of the gym leaders, which means _you’re_ headed back to Ballonlea.”

“Opal is already in Ballonlea and likely to have it under control, and no one’s going with you,” he reasons, tries to keep his voice level. _They haven’t had the dreams_. “Do you think that’s smart? Putting your _unbeatable_ reputation to the test in a match is one thing, but these consequences are _real_.”

No one says anything. 

Leon closes his eyes -- holds for a moment, Bede assumes, to evaluate being spoken to like a child _by_ a child -- and takes a long, tired breath before he makes a long, tired decision. Just says: “Alright.”

* * *

He thinks, as she leaves, that he would’ve liked to...do _something_ , anything less useless than standing there with his arms stiff at his sides.

Maybe she saw it, like she seems to see everything -- in his hands and his eyes and his shoulders, as clear to her as the sun in the sky, as simple as picking out an opponent’s dominant hand. He had slipped security and run onto the field and spilled half his heart all over them both in front of an audience so big it makes his gut knot to think about, looking back on it. _Stupid, impulsive._ She has a way of making herself seem larger, or the room seem smaller, or that the rest of the world has tilted off into the void, that it had seemed either so perfectly sensible or so unbearable he couldn’t _not_.

She has to know; has to be doing it on purpose. She is a ruiner. He’s told her that much, at least, so maybe she already knows the rest: _good luck, good job, please don’t die._

Hatterene coos, _sensing,_ looks at him with concern in her big black eyes, quests along his hair and cheeks and jaw, frantic feather-touches with her tiny little hands as though she can find the right buttons to push to put his emotions back where they ought to be.

“Sorry,” he says to her. Apologies sound rusty, but they come easier for his friend. She chirps, leans her head against his, and he closes his eyes. “It’s been a hard day and I’m trying my best.”

The rain comes down; the sky gets blacker. He combs Hatterene’s hair under the taxi stop until Leon returns, soaked and steeled, with maybe the only Corviknight left in Wyndon that would brave this storm. 

* * *

They don’t say a word. What is there to say? The Champion is not prepared for this -- ten years of interviews, of magazine articles, of token diplomatic meetings, of photoshoots and exhibition matches and the occasional challenge to his title -- and neither is he. He doesn’t know what to say in ways that don’t bring up _Rose,_ the only connection between them both.

He does not ask:

_Did you know? Did you care?_

_Did he use you, too?_

It is too much silence before either of them talk.

“Do you have anyone you want to call? In case...” Leon’s sentence drifts off, gets lost as he is. “Relatives? Parents?”

“I doubt they’ll need the warning,” Bede says, voice bland. _They were taken by the fairies. They are shadows. They are dead._ “They won’t be coming back.”

He looks at the horizon -- black on black, the pillars of red, every city built on a bad sign -- and thinks, _no one is._

* * *

Bede was taken by the fairies when he was sixteen.

The Wyndon ladders sustain him -- there’s no competition worth his time on the lower rungs, but he lives on the small-purse prize money, the cocky noncompetitors who get antsy after watching amateur matches and think, _I could do better_. His pockets aren’t heavy, but he’ll eat well until the season ends. 

The crowds are small without the spectacle of the televised leagues, though he overhears whispers sometimes of scouts, corporate headhunters on the prowl for the next great talent. He listens to kids _hoping_ they get plucked up and carried away and it makes every nerve in him scream -- _don’t trust sweet words and open doors, don’t get in the car, don’t let them put a hand on you, be smarter and faster because you are a runaway and they will get you if they can --_

He doesn’t need a patron, he decides; looks down on those who do. He doesn’t need pity, doesn’t need charity, doesn’t need more mean bastards in his life who would hold him down and brick him the first chance they get. He’ll scrap his way up to a minor league gym leader’s endorsement, as inevitable as the tides, because he is strong enough and talented enough to prove himself. Anything else is cheating, the weakest way to win.

(But then another part of himself, a little traitorous thorn, thinks: Imagine not having to fight twice as hard for a fraction as much.

Imagine being seen, chosen, valued _._ )

When his head is the one being hunted, he feels it coming from miles away. The hairs on the back of his neck are attuned to being watched.

The woman sits like a dressmaker’s doll in the bleachers, wide-brimmed sunhat and dark shades, a little black notebook perched in her lap. He memorizes: blond hair, glass skin, partridge bones and an orderly, button-up kind of menace in severe designer blouses. She radiates a chilly kind of competence that can’t be bought, only earned.

When he expects her to come talk to him, she doesn’t. 

She doesn’t at the next match, either, or the one after that, or the one after that. Six weeks go by until he’s nearly forgotten about her, has become so accustomed to the scalpel of her staring that he barely notices how numb it feels. He’s riding high on a winning streak and doesn’t need her anyway, because he is _ascendant_ , he is on his way to squaring off against the minor league leaders and that’s the only chance he needs.

He thinks, later, that if it had been _just_ her standing there in the motel lobby, he would have said no.

But it’s Chairman Rose who smiles broadly at him, a dazzle of neat, uniformly white teeth, a man of soft wool suits and precious metals and warm, open gestures. He extends a hand for a handshake and Bede accepts it politely as a reflex. He feels punch-drunk, half-concussed. “Bede, was it? Oleana tells me you’re quite the talent, and I don’t doubt her eye for a moment.”

His chest tightens. “Thank you, sir,” he says, slowly considering his words, slowly considering that this is the most powerful man in Galar in front of him, in front of _him--_ ”You’re…”

“Chairman Rose, of course -- pardon my manners -- and this is Oleana, my head of...well, quite everything.” He places a hand on Bede’s shoulder that seems achingly paternal, almost familiar, and he is too dazed to jerk away from it. The man smells of tobacco, drought roses, woods on fire. “I think you’ve got something remarkable in you, Bede, and the world needs remarkable people. Macro Cosmos _certainly_ does. Yes, I think you’d be perfect. Oleana, don’t you agree?”

“I do, Chairman.”

He can hardly breathe between the perfume and the weight of the words and the arm around his shoulder now, this man who is too powerful to ignore, this man who is _choosing him_ \--

“Oleana, would you have the driver bring the car around and make arrangements for that tidy little place on Bellamy? I’d love a good moussaka. Are you fond of Almian, Bede?”

“Sir?”

“Ah, I’m getting ahead of myself again. I’d like to speak with you more over dinner, if that’s agreeable to you. I find conducting business to be much more tolerable on a full stomach.” He laughs at that, pats his rounded belly, and Bede’s shoulders ache where he doesn’t have enough padding to protect from the gentle pressure of Rose’s arm.

“Business,” Bede repeats, tongue heavy in his mouth. It feels like cotton. “So you’d like to…”

“Sponsor you, of course. And I believe I have another project you could help with tremendously, if you’d be willing to offer your assistance. You see, I’m in a bit of a spot…”

The car is beautiful, glimmering like a slick of black ice, and the restaurant is beautiful, and the food is beautiful, and the words -- everything is rich and warm and clean and honeyed, from the loukoumades he devours like a rangy stray to the spiced mead Rose coaxes him to try, _you’re old enough, aren’t you?,_ to the star-bright promises of something bigger, better, greater than he could ever accomplish on his own. 

“Oleana is my right hand, but I’m afraid my left is empty, Bede. I’m hoping you could change that.” Rose pushes aside a bottle of dessert brandy and cleared plates to make room for a black leather binder, and a pen. “We will do incredible things together. I know it.”

( _Don’t eat their food, don’t drink their wine, don’t sign their contracts--)_

But he is already theirs before the ink of his name even dries.

* * *

It is a terrible thing to be owned. 

He knows this now as he flies into Hammerlocke, rubbing his wrists as though Rose’s kind of ownership had ever left real bruises. He remembers the gratitude and the desperation as painful as any brand -- makes his molars tingle with the urge to throw up. The soulsickness is worse than the cold, than the rain, than the red on the horizon.

 _They will be casualties,_ a little voice buzzes in his skull, _and you helped._

For the first time in his life, he is glad his parents are only dead, and nothing else. He would not wish this on them, or anyone.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bede deserves to be at the final confrontation with rose more than anyone change my mind JUST KIDDING YOU CAN'T


	4. Chapter 4

The rain is heaviest in Hammerlocke.

Leon comes alive with confidence here, finally, feet on the ground, as he sees Raihan jog up the cobblestone to meet him with an exhausted, dragon-toothed grin. They break off to talk about the situation, what has been done and what needs doing. Bede runs his hand through his hair, swipes curls back that plaster in the rain, and tries not to look at the pillar of light, the vortex in the clouds; tries not to think of Rose; tries not to think of the small tremor in his hand, anchored to his belt, as his fingers drift over his teammates. 

(Thinks instead: _What the hell were you thinking?_ He is not this kind of fighter, not this kind of brave. He is a configuration of mistakes too stubborn to stop, a compilation of losses in the fights that matter most. _Even your courage is secondhand. Don’t you have anything?_ It had seemed so reasonable in the locker room, so perfectly manageable, I-do-this-and-you-do-that with all of Gloria’s bulletproof confidence, and now he’s here and Rose is here and she’s off in the witching woods chasing after fairy tales and he is far too small for this and--)

He takes a deep breath.

“Bede,” Leon calls, waving him over. Water runs down the brim of his cap, weighs down his cloak. He thinks it might be the first time the Champion has used his name and not _Rose’s endorsement_ or _Opal’s protégé_ or looked at him with a guarded kind of diplomacy that says _I know what you did to my kid brother._ Leon’s finger points up to the sky, to the pulsing heart of the storm. “Raihan’s doing damage control on the ground, so you’re up with me. He’s saying it’s a dragon. Just your kind of time, right?”

“I’ll do my best,” he says.

Leon nods.

* * *

_Make sure the generator room’s secure,_ Leon says on the elevator ride down. _I’ll go on ahead_.

And oh, isn’t that a mistake too.

* * *

~~Once upon a time the changeling boy, the wildling unfit for human things like cities and families and love and kindness, takes a long-limbed running leap at his Master and sinks sharp teeth into the soft column of his neck and waits for him to bleed all his blood, for his death to set the boy free from the contract~~

* * *

“Ah,” Rose says, adjusting his tie. His smile is neat, too sure, tucked around too-white teeth and a too-ready tongue for a man standing in the aftermath of a bomb. His shoes crunch glass as he takes one, two, three steps, arm spread in welcome like he’s opening a ceremony, a press conference, a boardroom meeting. “You weren’t who I was expecting, but isn’t this a pleasant surprise! You seem to be doing quite well for yourself, Bede. I saw the little show you put on earlier, very clever. Impulsive, but charming. Bravo.”

Of course he remembers his name _now._

“All thanks to you,” Bede says. He doesn’t know how he disguises the hate in his voice because it is all that he feels, from the skin of his scalp to the marrow of his bones. He thought he’d known and felt every kind of hate there was, but seeing Rose here so _calm_ , so _confident,_ as though he has done nothing and hurt _no one_ \-- this is new. Hatterene brushes his mind, white-hot psychic fingerprints, even from inside her ball. “I don’t know where I’d be if you hadn’t thrown me out with the rubbish.”

“I can see you’re still upset about that. That’s understandable. But it all turned out for the best, didn’t it? Even if it isn’t exactly what you were hoping for.”

A waxy smile, teeth like little white thorns. Rose’s mouth is seated neatly with ambassadorial language. (He is ten again, and the group home councilor gives him a smile so empty it doesn’t mean anything at all.)

“If I’m honest? I imagine you’d be watching from the stands with the rest of the semi-finalists and then back to battling children for their lunch money in the next week or so. Instead, you’ve been taken under the wing of a well-respected gym leader, with a bright future in Ballonlea in front of you. That’s quite a coup, wouldn’t you say?”

 _Know that I did this. I make everything happen._ He thinks: Rose is an arbok in expensive suits and custom cufflinks and words that hiss from the heart. Nothing else about him makes sense. 

“Don’t you dare act like you did me a favor, as if you _planned_ this outcome. As if you even considered for a moment what would happen to me when you took everything back.” 

Hatterene’s ball shakes on his belt and Bede holds his hand over it, _calm, breathe, be still._

“Do you think I’m that callous of a man, Bede? Of course I considered it; I didn’t get where I am by carelessly casting off the people I’ve gathered to me. It’s no mystery what usually happens to an at-risk youth being placed back into his original environment. I didn’t want that.” 

_You are an investment._ Rose threads his fingers together, holds his hands in front of him like a judge. _You are a data point in a government survey. You are numbers in a spreadsheet._

“But,” he continues, “I do have to draw the line at my principles. I’d have fired any other employee under the same circumstances.” 

It shouldn’t, Bede thinks distantly, it should be so far behind him that the feelings could never hope to catch up, but the word _employee_ catches him like a bodyblow, punches air out of his lungs.

“For obeying orders?” He clenches his fists, white-knuckled, little pink crescent moons where his nails bite his palms. “Oleana was the one who told me to it. She was the one with the plan. I only did what was asked of me; that’s all I _ever_ did.”

Rose gives him an unreadable look then. (He is fourteen again, taking a shortcut through a carpark after dark, and a man with an unreadable look has been following him for two blocks. _It’s time to run_.) “Oleana didn’t force you to do anything. Part of becoming a man,” he says slowly, advancing one, two, three steps, glass popping on the metal under his feet, “is learning to shoulder your own tragedies.”

 _I was powerless,_ he wants to say but it can’t get through the brambles in his throat. _It was never a choice._ Instead, says: “Is that what this is, then?”

He tries to regulate his voice where it starts to shake, stumble, break; tries to remember the lessons that Opal gave him. 

_Deep breaths. Focus on your lines._

His face is hot and his lungs are tight and he wants to vanish -- to tuck tail and bolt to the elevator, to the gates of Hammerlocke, off into the wilderness until he is _gone_ and _safe._

He wants to coil fingers into his own hair and scream until the pressure in his head bleeds off. 

He wants to throw fists until he feels the crunch of cartilage and the rattle of loose teeth and skin splitting like overripe fruit. (He’s twelve again, getting cornered in the group home common room by a boy with inches and a full two stone on him who called him a fairy boy, called him _pretty,_ and the gush of blood from the boy’s nose over his knuckles _satisfies_ _._ )

 _Be better than your impulses._

“Is this you shouldering your tragedy? Tricking a child into helping you release a monster that could destroy Galar for the sake of...what, exactly? Galar? Am I meant to take this as a _lesson?”_

He scoffs. “What an absolute joke. I was a fool to ever get tangled up with you.”

Bede expects pushback -- offense, weapons raised, teammates called. He expects another volley of excuses, _I didn’t do this, I made you, you owe me._ He gets none of it. Rose’s face softens, folds into familiar, pleasant, painfully _paternal_ creases, and he says, quietly, “Opal’s done good work with you, hasn’t she? You’ve come a long way.”

Another three steps, glass and metal underneath his soles; wide, generous body language, arms spread, and a smile that sparkles like champagne. Bede falls back, step for step, instincts craving distance.

“I was afraid your recklessness would compromise the project, but here you are, as collected and composed as I could expect out of anyone in this situation. I’m impressed with you, Bede. And I’m proud.”

It takes a second before the words slide home like a knife slipping up under his breastbone, settling against his thundering heart. (He is four years old again and a blond man he hasn’t seen in months, in an eternity, picks him up and presses a kiss to his forehead.)

He had come prepared for everything but _that_.

Rose steps toward him again with a gentle confidence, unhurried, unthreatened. Bede doesn’t move, legs bolted in place. “I spent a great deal of time wondering if I’d been equally reckless, letting you go. You’d been a tremendous help, after all; I couldn’t have asked for anyone more eager or more willing. Without you, none of this could’ve happened.”

“Don’t,” he says. It doesn’t have enough power behind it, nowhere near enough to slow Rose down as he keeps coming, keeps walking. (He is five years old again and the nurse is easing shards of glass out of his cheek, telling him _this will only sting a little_ and he says _don’t,_ he is confused and his nerves are on fire and he _wants to see his parents._ ) He swallows a thick patina of spit that nearly hurts as it drags down his dry throat. “Don’t you dare.”

Rose always dares. It is how he built his empire. His smile blinds.

“In a few moments, Leon will have taken care of Eternatus, and we’ll be able to tell the whole of Galar that their future has been delivered. Why not come with me, Bede? Being a gym leader is respectable, certainly, but the potential for growth is...limited.”

And then Rose is standing there in front of him smelling of desert flowers and forest fires, radiating a warmth that Bede knows by now can’t be _genuine_ but makes hearts unfurl and drift toward him anyway, fluttering around his power like moths. This close, he is a terrible brightness -- the only man in the room, the only sun in the sky.

He says: “There _is_ a place for you.”

(For all his efforts he is sixteen again, sick with honey, pen in hand and thorns at his throat.)

He has to be lying. He must be lying.

But if he _isn’t?_

“ _Bede.”_

It is one word shot from behind him like a cannon. His head whips around and it’s -- 

Comical, really. The cavalry’s here and it’s a soaking wet farmgirl in her bland, hand-knitted sweater, in her ripped jeans and hand-me-down boots, hefting a shitty, rusted, broken sword up on her shoulder. Gloria looks like she’s just pulled it from the lake and she’s ready to rally an army with a warcry. 

(The worst part is that it looks so natural in her hand he thinks that maybe, in another life, she did.)

He wants to laugh. He wants to double over and laugh until he can’t hear the storm over the sound of himself, like he hasn’t laughed in _years_ , if he’s ever laughed that hard. She shouldn’t inspire confidence -- she looks absolutely ridiculous, undignified in every way that matters -- but it’s there anyway, a little secondhand seed of something blooming in his chest.

When she lances forward like a warrior, snarling, boiling with some kind of righteous fury, her sleeves rolled up and flanked by her wickedly sharp haxorus -- even Rose takes a few steps back.

 _“_ He _hurt_ you.” The back of her hand brushes his as she plants herself beside him, warm and steady as a hearthfire. “Lay him the fuck _out_ _._ ”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” he murmurs, and she smirks at him, and it’s like the rest of the world tumbles off into the void.

(She makes everything so _simple_. Who is this vicious girl, really, scars on her knuckles and her arms and her mouth? Why is she always a tall figure in his moments of weakness? _Why can’t he shake her?_ )

It's easier, when his head clears: Rose is a small man with a great, terrible dream standing in its ruins, watching them with snake eyes -- no larger-than-life future, no beautiful promises to be found.

“It’s a shame it had to come to this.” Rose is already reaching for the first two pokeballs on his belt, escavalier and perrserker, honed to fine, shiny points. “You’d still be eating from food banks and sharing mattresses on the floor if it weren’t for me.”

_I made you. You are mine._

Bede bares his teeth like a liepard grins, wild and wide and knife-sharp. “I don’t owe you anything.”

And then Hatterene emerges with a banshee shriek that rattles the steel walls, beautiful light and psychic energy humming in his head like radio static and a molten fury that sucks the air out of the room; and a haxorus runs in from behind with a primal, belly-deep _roar,_ black scales glittering in the half-light like jewels and her footfalls leaving gouges in the floor.

Together, then.

* * *

Once upon a time, a changeling boy and a farmgirl brought a dragon down from the sky.

“No one made me,” he tells it, “and no one owns me.”

And when the farmgirl takes his hand, gives him a dizzy, victory-drunk grin, runs a thumb down the rise and fall of his knuckles, he knows with an absolute certainty it is only because he allows it, and that the heart that hammers in his chest is his and only his.

* * *

The dream changes. 

* * *

It goes like this:

Everything explodes.

Molten rebar and glassed concrete sizzle and the Champion bleeds where he lies flung aside like a paper crane and he can’t hear what the brother and the farmer’s girl are shouting through the ringing in his ears, the percussion of the storm. Black water stinks like tar, sluices down the steps, down the sides of the keep -- tastes like ash and acid in his mouth when he opens it to yell --

It doesn’t matter, does it? Sound blisters here. There is an awful voracity, a monster older than mercy, older than their cities and the words they write, sharp bones and crackling plasma and glowing hotter than fire. 

She stands there under the guttering lights, tilting against the wind, sword raised high, _ridiculous girl, mad girl_ \-- stands in front of a god that wants to _unmake everything_ and she’s flinging curses at it like her voice alone could be a match.

Hatterene and haxorus and cinderace throw themselves at a barrier that will not come down.

The Champion’s brother wields bandages and prayers.

Then its voice is inside his skull, and it feels like burning alive from the inside out, crackling in his bones, behind the sockets of his eyes. His mouth blooms with ozone. He breathes through the pain, air hitching in his throat.

**_The wolf-touched are first_.**

He watches as she gets hit with debris, a direct blow to her midsection that takes her to the ground coughing, and some grotesque plated tentacle reaches for her--

He _runs_.

It hits him first, swats at him like he’s a gnat -- his vision shatters into stars, a burst of bright white light and and a moment where nothing exists -- and then it grabs him, hooked and slithering around his ankle. It heaves him up like he’s feathers and dust.

Blood trickles up his lobes, up his temples, up into his hair where it will dry sticky and matted. He dangles like the hanged man, colors bland, vision bobbing up and down through waves of brown static.

Somewhere beneath the pain and the ocean of noise -- he thinks he hears the first wolves howling.

Or maybe it’s only his hatterene as she looses an otherworldly sound he’s never heard from her, a scream at a pitch that could shatter crystal; the barrier is not _down_ but she punches through it, and the deep, smoking mark her power leaves on the thing’s flesh will stay with it forever if it doesn’t fall here. Pride swells in his chest -- she is gorgeous in her anger, _best friends until they die_ \--

And he looks at this monster in what passes for its eye, and smirks. 

Tells it: _Go ahead, if you even can._

* * *

It feels like he’s been hanging for so long that when he finally falls, it’s almost a relief.

* * *

This is how the world ends:

Everything is black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. bede can have a little psychic ability, as a treat
> 
> 2\. i just wanted the climax of the game to be a much bigger deal than it was and im unapologetically melodramatic 24/7 come get me


	5. Chapter 5

Bede bolts awake and regrets it more than he’s ever regretted anything. 

A thunderclap of pain that leaves him breathless rolls from the base of his skull to the rise of his ribcage, stars sticking to his vision. He gasps deeply and that only makes it worse. Something in the room groans like a wounded animal. (Is it him? It must be him. Embarrassing.) Then something else grasps his arm, five familiar points of warmth, which he jerks away by instinct _(don’t let them touch you)_ , and that calls another wave of pain and that makes him suck a hissing breath through his teeth and clench his stomach which calls another --

“There you are, you’re awright. Easy now.” Unmistakable accent but quieter, softer, all the harsh edges filed off. He can just make out Gloria’s contour against the streetlight orange filtering through the window; _just_ pick out the stark white of butterfly bandages on her temple, her jaw, her arms. _Alive._

She folds jittery hands in her lap. “So. It’s half-nine and you’re in hospital. They ran tests, you’re fine--ish--but they’re gonna keep you a couple days for observation on account ae the head trauma. Your team’s safe. Oh, good news, the world’s no’ gonna end, so...”

Gloria talks (and talks _and talks_ ) and her voice slides into oddly pleasant, half-musical background noise as he sinks into the scratchy linens, muscles uncoiling. The pain dulls from stab to ache; he takes inventory of what’s hurting. Head, definitely. A migraine’s rooted like weeds right behind his eyes. His thoughts feel heavy, slithering down into deep places he doesn’t have the energy to reach. Ribs might be cracked, if the pain at the top of every breath is an indicator. Wrist, shoulder, ankle all feel loose and watery and wrong in their sockets.

Could be worse. Could be dead.

She says something about the champion -- still out cold, Hop still waiting -- and something insane about dogs with weaponry, hands splayed and animated. He mostly notices how close her chair is. It’s not like she scraped it across the room when he woke up. She’s been keeping vigil _,_ as much a fixture at his bedside as the IV stand _._

And she’s been here the whole time.

(Hospitals are where things get taken _away_ from him; this is the opposite and he still feels almost as furious, a whitewater rush of a half dozen things he does not know what to do with that are so much more complicated with so much less context.)

“...An’ I called Opal for you. No train or taxi service runnin’ the night but she’ll be out when she can. I said I’d keep her updated, so I should actually--”

“Why are you here?” he interrupts. It takes effort to level a stare at her, full focus and straight into her eyes.

She blinks, taken aback. “Excuse me?”

“Do you have head trauma too?” He tries to ignore the room swaying as he props himself up with his good arm. “Let me to try more slowly: Why. Are. You. Here? We’re not friends. We’re rivals, and my season is _over._ I’ll be going back to Ballonlea, and even presuming you beat Leon -- which is laughable -- we won’t speak for months. More likely you’ll lose and I doubt I’ll ever see you again. There’s no reason for you to be here.”

“Well you _did_ take a hell of a hit for me, you absolute maddie, and likely saved ma life. The least I can do is stick around an’ make sure you’re alright.” 

“Don’t flatter yourself.” He scoffs. “You weren’t even a consideration, so you can pack up your feelings of obligation and leave me in peace. I don’t need you to _take care_ of me.”

“Oh, aye?” Gloria pauses then, the planes of her face shifting, butterfly bandages stretching as her mouth moves like she’s chewing on her words. She doesn’t break eye contact, only matches his dare with her own. “I went through your phone,” she says softly.

“You what _._ ”

“No’ like snoopin’, just didn’t have Opal’s number.” _Oh,_ he hates how soft she looks now; he hates more what’s going to come next. He braces himself, fingers curled into the blanket, waiting for the impact. “Bede, she’s the only contact in your book. You’ve go’ _naebody_.”

There it is. His lips twist up like he’s sucked on something sour. “So it’s pity with a dose of flagrant disrespect for my privacy, then.”

“Oh fuck sake, was no’ like I dug around for your diary entries. It was an emergency _._ ” She pinches the bridge of her nose and winces as she agitates a cut. On her other hand she starts numbering points with her fingers even as he opens his mouth to protest. “And _no,_ it’s no’ pity, it’s no’ obligation. You wanna know why I’m here? Fae the minute you shoulder-checked Hop in Motostoke crowin’ about how _elite_ you were I figured you’d no’ act like that if you had people who gave a fuck about you. An’ I was right. So here I am, on purpose.”

“Aren’t you just a saint.” There’s heat in his chest now, a burgeoning little pit of magma rising up his throat. Words dart up before he has time to regret them. “Do you do this regularly, then? Hunt down strays on the side of the road, give them food and a pat on the head, and expect them to fall over themselves in gratitude after a few months? Do you really think I’m that pathetic?” 

“Aha. I see. So we’re dain’ this song and dance, then?” She throws up her hands, leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. “Alright, Bede, open fire. Gies your best.”

“I always do.” He pushes himself up to full sitting height, spine straight, chin out. It’s only out of sheer defiance he doesn’t make a noise when his ribs answer with a fierce jolt of pain. “You know what? I take it back. ‘Hunt’ was too strong of a word. It’s giving you too much credit, considering you can’t even coordinate your wardrobe, let alone an actual, targeted campaign. Maybe this is just the only way you know how to make friends. No one likes you for your merits because once the jokes grow tired, you’re a nobody from nowhere and you have nothing left worth offering. They have to _owe you_ to put up with you for long _._ ”

He watches Gloria’s hands draw into loose fists, running her thumbs in slow circles around her first knuckle like worrying at a coin. Her face folds into something smooth and impassive, taut as a tripwire, good humor melting away. Her brown eyes look black in the low light as she watches him intently. 

_There it is_ , he thinks. _Finally._

He presses onward like the follow-through of a sword swing. “Because you’re always the last choice, aren’t you? Because just being yourself is never quite _enough_. You’re only in the gym challenge because Leon wanted you to pony for his brother, and everyone knew it. I saw the stands in your matches. Nobody cared until you were the only challenger left.”

Bede smiles at her like a liepard does, teeth and triumph, made bold by momentum. “Even your best friend in the world couldn’t wait to leave you behind. It must be exhausting to invest so much energy into people who wouldn’t give you a backwards glance the moment something more exciting comes along _._ Honestly, I’m not even insulted you thought it would work on me. I’m just embarrassed for you.”

She holds his eyes and stays silent for maybe the longest he’s ever seen her go without talking; her shoulders square up like a boxer’s, scrappy and purposeful and aware of her margins. She doesn’t cry, at least, not like Hop, who’d had tears welling in the corners of his eyes when he balled his fist and took a wild swing.

That’s at least one thing to admire.

(But the rest of it -- this does not feel satisfying, does not feel _good._ She looks dangerous here in her stillness, like she’s calculating the right angle to deliver the most punishing blow, but she is _more_ dangerous every other way. Better she hurt him now, like this, something bloody and black and blue and easy to heal.)

“Come on then, Gloria. Why don’t you give me _your_ best?”

When she lunges for him, her jaw tight and muscles springloaded, he is ready.

Her right hand takes his good wrist in a firm grip (a hard push back like the dip in a dance and she could dislocate it; knows because he’s done it), the fingers on her left slide into the curls at the nape of his neck (she could pull him out of bed and let gravity do the work, easy) --

And then she ducks her head in, ear to ear, chin coming to rest on the slope of his shoulder.

It’s not a hug -- he’s too injured, too delicate, he can’t be squeezed or jostled -- but it’s too gentle to be anything else; it’s been so long since anyone’s been this close that she may as well have pinned him like a beartic. He hisses like it scalds, as his stomach hitches and his heart hammers hard and birdlike against his sternum and he can’t tell _what,_ exactly, hurts the most in the chaos of his nerves.

She holds for a long, quiet moment and he sits statue-still, rigid as marble, acutely aware of her breathing, her heartbeat. She smells like ozone and rust and disinfectant; battlefields and hospitals. Every point she touches burns so acutely he’s half-convinced he’ll find red, angry blisters the shape of fingerprints once she finally lets him go.

Then she laughs, a short little breathy gust that stirs the hairs on his neck. “Fair fucks to you, Bede, that was a brilliant pull. You really are a tremendous bastard.”

"So I've been told."

“I’ve go’ three older brothers,” she continues, “an’ you’re still the meanest boy I’ve ever met by leagues. Just an all-around nightmare. You’re mouthy an’ uncooperative even on your best days. You get _cruel_. You’ll have a square go with anyone over anything the instant you feel threatened, which is _aw the time_. I’ve never known a bigger, more disagreeable prick.”

Nothing he hasn’t heard a thousand times a thousand ways before, but he has never heard it spoken with any kind of fondness, never while someone was _holding him_. He tries to conjure up confidence, defiance; comes up instead with a quiet voice and a dry mouth. “If you’re done describing me--”

“--I’m _no’._ Listen. As much of a shite as you can be, there are so many things I admire about you I dunno where to even start. You’re tough as hell. You’re _resilient_ . You’re so clever an’ perceptive which is what makes you an amazin’ trainer, ‘cause you’ve always got me on my toes. You’re sweet with your pokémon, an’ there’s no sense denyin’ it ‘cause I’ve seen it. No real asshole could make a hatterene love them like yours loves you. You _care._

“So fight all you want, Bede. I can take what you throw at me, nae bother. You tell me in no uncertain terms to fuck off an’ I’m gone, but if all you’re gonna do is pick fights an’ try to run me out, it won’t work. You’ll have to haul me away yourself, an’ good luck gettin’ up to so much as hang a pish you fuckin’ invalid, ‘cause you’ll no’ get me out this chair.”

He swallows thickly. This was not how this was meant to go.

She pulls back then, gingerly easing her fingers out of his hair, the pad of her thumb dragging over the pulse point of his wrist before finally letting him go. He doesn’t know whether or not to be grateful (does not know what to feel, if he could even name any of it); he mostly takes the opportunity to ease himself back down, settling into the pillows, absently flexing his wrist, ignoring the vague itch at his neck where his skin feels foreign and strange. When he looks at her, she only plants herself defiantly, like her hands could lash themselves to the armrests, taking root in the wood.

(There is no beating her; that is the one thought that clarifies in the murk, the one bright thing he can reach for and grasp tightly. From the crystal caves to the redrock of Stow-on-Side, from Wyndon to Hammerlocke to right here, right now: She _wins_.)

“Then I suppose there’s no getting rid of you,” he relents, finally, the first thought he can scrape together that doesn’t just die on his teeth. “If you’re just going to sit there, at least make yourself useful and turn on the telly.”

“So bossy,” she says, and the little silvery scar at the corner of her mouth stretches with her grin. 

* * *

Once upon a time, a mother he barely remembers now used to read him fairytales from a large book with a gilded spine, pretty stories full of dashing princes and fairest maidens and cruel villains -- where brave boys could get whatever their heart desired if their blade was sharp enough and their name was good enough and they ran their ambitions to ground like a nobleman hunts a nickit. Even grief was a temporary and exquisite thing; _happily ever after_ was a guarantee.

That was what he’d wanted.

(It was never what he got. More fighting is the only reward for being the best at fighting; being the best at hunting still means chasing or risk being chased or get left behind forever. Real grief was grotesque and lasting, carried like a deformity that made people recoil when they got close enough to see it. Nothing is as pretty as it sounds on the page.)

What he wants now is much less clear. 

Gloria is an ugly sleeper: an awkward configuration of limbs, a leg tucked against her chest, the other stretched out and propped up on his bed. Her spine seems improbable, curved like a willow branch as her torso twists to find a comfortable spot to stow her arm. Her head leans against whatever surface it happens to fall on. There’s long, bright red pressure-pattern on her cheek where she fell asleep on her own sweater’s toggles.

It’d been so easy to hate her, he hadn’t even had to try. It burst up from inside him like a geyser. He had put in _years_ of effort and she’d been lifted up to his level by the luck of association, just a side-character in another boy’s story, nothing dignified or worthy about her. She made mistakes a first-year in trainer school wouldn’t make with the same confidence he saved for his best strategies, and she beat him anyway. Her talent was untested and unearned; an extraordinary thing stored in ordinary bones, an overriding instinct to throw herself into it -- into everything -- and let her body figure out the kinetics.

Nobody saw her coming. Battle by battle, she unmade all his work; even when it stopped mattering, even after he stopped _hating,_ everything she did was some unique flavor of unbearable that he couldn’t stop himself from coming back, like picking at a scab or pulling at the skin around a sunburn, just to see if he could get the itch to stop. The compulsion rattles around in his hindbrain like a coin in a panhandler’s cup.

He’s here because of her.

“Why did I do that?” he murmurs. She doesn’t wake up, doesn’t even stir. His fingers reach out, ghost along a butterfly bandage holding together a drying wound. They follow along the soft architecture of her cheekbones, the asymmetrical spray of freckles scattered from cheek to cheek. They stop just shy of the little scar at the corner of her mouth, and he thinks, abruptly:

_Oh._

* * *

The dream becomes this:

Bede sits on a bench at the Ballonlea station, waiting for his parents’ train to come in.

It’s been hours. It’s been days. Difficult to tell under the canopy -- the mushrooms glow at all hours until time loses its meaning, some internal mechanism that keeps them shining when other woods go dark. They made it hard to sleep at first. He hasn’t needed a nightlight since he was very young.

Seasons change. Ballonlea has a wet season and a dry season; the leaves never fall. It’s preferable, he thinks, to the light dustings of snow that Wyndon gets, or the occasional bitter winter squalls off the mountains. For a forest full of fae, it is predictable. He appreciates the routine.

Finally, he looks at his watch, stands up, and decides:

_They’re not coming._

Opal waits for him in front of the station, bundled in matronly furs. “They’re not coming,” he tells her.

“They aren’t,” she agrees. 

He stuffs his hands into the pockets of his sweater, shrugging. “I’m not sure why I expected any different.” 

“Are you disappointed?” She offers her arm out to him. He takes it. They walk like this sometimes, lending his support when the arthritis in her wrists hurts too much to lean on the cane.

“I’ll live,” he says. 

“I think you just might.” She smiles at him broadly then. He isn’t sure when he graduated to real affection, but he prefers it to the rations of consideration she’d given him when he first arrived. She squeezes his arm, then pats it gently, a motion that is growing more familiar. “You’ve had a long day, haven’t you? Come inside, child. I’ll put the kettle on.”

The evening is quiet and the tea is warm.

It’s enough.

* * *

Weeks later, Gloria wins.

He forgets himself, the instant that Leon’s charizard falls in an explosion that rocks the stadium. Hop does too; they stand together and cheer, laughing, ignoring for the moment that they’d promised to fight each other until they bled the last time they met. Even Marnie smiles.

The whole box erupts -- the stadium erupts, a hundred thousand voices weaving together disbelief and joy and anguish like they’ve just witnessed her shoot the sun out of the sky -- and he has never heard anything louder, anything more complete.

Hop’s voice floats somewhere in the noise. “We really never stood a chance, huh?”

“Speak for yourself,” Bede says evenly, but his grin is wide and proud. “I won't be giving up so easily.”

(It is barely even a decision; it is an instinct. There is nowhere she goes that he won’t follow.)

* * *

Once upon a time, there was a changeling boy, long-limbed and not-quite-right, born to the cities but made home in the witching woods. There was a farmer’s girl with rough hands and a rougher mouth and a borrowed crown that does not sit properly on her head.

They are outsiders too unlovely for fairytales -- he is a bad body double turned loose into the wilderness, living a lesser life so a nicer boy could live a better one; she is a mistake, a frustrating fieldstone, a girl no one looked twice at until she left them with no other option.

She says, _let’s celebrate,_ as though the sky blazing with fireworks doesn’t count if they aren’t for him too.

Her hand fits neatly in his as she drags him from the service entrance through the parking lot, through the alleys, down to the waterfront. The nights are still warm in Wyndon as the year winds down; he can hear post-championship celebrations and street musicians carry on the autumn air even across the river, drums and... “Bagpipes? Really?” he asks, and she shrugs and grins and says something in Crownish, her spine straight with pride.

“Now. A toast." She pulls a bottle out her bag, bottom-shelf wine some revolting neon cherry-red color with a twist top, and he quirks an eyebrow. “I'm no good at these. To fuckin’ up everyone’s plans? To bein’ thorns in the sides of aw the miserable bastards who think we’re no’ good enough?”

She twists the cap off and hands the bottle to him first; he raises it eye-level like a champagne flute with more dignity than it deserves and says, “To slaying our dragons. Cheers.”

It’s as foul as he expected, like melted sweets and surgical spirit. He drinks deep anyway, smirking at her visible surprise as he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and returns the bottle to her open palm.

“To slayin’ our dragons.” She works the words over in her mouth slowly, like she’s appreciating the flavor of each. “I’ll drink to tha’. _Slàinte mhath_.”

When the fireworks die down, they’re still handing the bottle back and forth, each time a bit warmer, a bit looser, until they’re laughing like they have never been anything but this.

And when her friends show up -- Hop waving and grinning, Marnie with a heavy bag of takeaway -- and he thinks it’s time to leave, her fingers tangle into his like grasping vines, tugging him back down. “Am no’ gonna make you stay, but I’d rather you did.” 

Then she says it like it’s the most obvious truth in the world, like she’s confused he wouldn’t already know: “Mine is yours, Bede. Friends included.”

And something in his chest clicks.

* * *

In the end, there are far worse places to lay his loyalty, he thinks.

He eats her food and drinks her wine and she asks him for nothing in return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. big huge thank you to everyone who put up with this absolute nightmare of a one-shot that completely exploded beyond my control as we took a journey together through pacing issues and buckwild tonal shifts as i desperately attempted to make everything come together in a way that could almost be seen as purposeful AND THEY DIDN'T EVEN KISS. i honestly did not anticipate this reception at all and im cry.
> 
> 2\. yeah i'm calling scots-gaelic "crownish" the crown tundra is pokéscotland that's my headcanon come get me

**Author's Note:**

> [my tumblr](https://hello-pyroxene.tumblr.com/)   
> 


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